I personally wouldn't call three years ago — when we started to deprecate it, in glusterfs-3.9 — a recent change.
As a community the decision was made to move to NFS-Ganesha as the preferred NFS solution, but it was agreed to keep the old code in the tree for those who wanted it. There have been plans to drop it from the community packages for most of those three years, but we didn't follow through across the board until fairly recently. Perhaps the most telling piece of data is that it's been gone from the packages in the CentOS Storage SIG in glusterfs-4.0, -4.1, -5, -6, and -7 with no complaints ever, that I can recall.
Ganesha is a preferable solution because it supports NFSv4, NFSv4.1, NFSv4.2, and pNFS, in addition to legacy NFSv3. More importantly, it is actively developed, maintained, and supported, both in the community and commercially. There are several vendors selling it, or support for it; and there are community packages for it for all the same distributions that Gluster packages are available for.
Out in the world, the default these days is NFSv4. Specifically v4.2 or v4.1 depending on how recent your linux kernel is. In the linux kernel, client mounts start negotiating for v4.2 and work down to v4.1, v4.0, and only as a last resort v3. NFSv3 client support in the linux kernel largely exists at this point only because of the large number of legacy servers still running that can't do anything higher than v3. The linux NFS developers would drop the v3 support in a heartbeat if they could.
IMO, providing it, and calling it maintained, only encourages people to keep using a dead end solution. Anyone in favor of bringing back NFSv2, SSHv1, or X10R4? No? I didn't think so.
The recent issue[1] where someone built gnfs in glusterfs-7.0 on CentOS7 strongly suggests to me that gnfs is not actually working well. Three years of no maintenance seems to have taken its toll.
Other people are more than welcome to build their own packages from the src.rpms and/or tarballs that are available from gluster — and support them. It's still in the source and there are no plans to remove it. (Unlike most of the other deprecated features which were recently removed in glusterfs-7.)
On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 5:31 AM Amar Tumballi <amarts@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi All,_______________________________________________As per the discussion on https://review.gluster.org/23645, recently we changed the status of gNFS (gluster's native NFSv3 support) feature to 'Depricated / Orphan' state. (ref: https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L185..L189). With this email, I am proposing to change the status again to 'Odd Fixes' (ref: https://github.com/gluster/glusterfs/blob/master/MAINTAINERS#L22)TL;DR;I understand the current maintainers are not able to focus on maintaining it as the focus of the project, as earlier described, is keeping NFS-Ganesha based integration with glusterfs. But, I am volunteering along with Xie Changlong (currently working at Chinamobile), to keep the feature running as it used to in previous versions. Hence the status of 'Odd Fixes'.Before sending the patch to make these changes, I am proposing it here now, as gNFS is not even shipped with latest glusterfs-7.0 releases. I have heard from some users that it was working great for them with earlier releases, as all they wanted was NFS v3 support, and not much of features from gNFS. Also note that, even though the packages are not built, none of the regression tests using gNFS are stopped with latest master, so it is working same from at least last 2 years.I request the package maintainers to please add '--with gnfs' (or --enable-gnfs) back to their release script through this email, so those users wanting to use gNFS happily can continue to use it. Also points to users/admins is that, the status is 'Odd Fixes', so don't expect any 'enhancements' on the features provided by gNFS.Happy to hear feedback, if any.Regards,Amar
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